Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Toronto's airport...

The first challenge I've experienced in Canada was on my first day in this country. I arrived in Toronto after almost 13 hours flying. I was really hungry, tired and homesick. I forgot to ask for vegetarian meal, so I didn't eat anything in the airplane. I was also worried I wouldn't have sufficient time to go to the baggage reclaim to collect my bags and put them in the right place so they could go to Vancouver. I arrived in the aiport at 7:00am and my flight to Vancouver was supposed to be at 9:30am, but it was delayed. I was going to go to Vancouver only at 11:30am. I felt chuffed because I would have time to eat, to find the place to put my bags and also to go through immigration. However, something strange happened. My boyfriend went thhrough immigration, but not me. They told me it was not necessary, but I knew it was. I needed my study permit and also my work permit. I felt downcast. I couldn't believe that something went wrong just on my first day travelling abroad. First, I decided to find the place to put my bags. It was very stressed, because I received a wrong information and lost a lot of time. Then, I started asking a lot of people what I should do about the immigration and they were very rude with me. I was desperate, because I couldn't find a solution. I continued asking until someone decided to help me. I had to go to five different places in the airport to solve my problem and when I got to the right place the man asked me a lot of times how I didn't go through immigration. I wanted to know the answer as well. After almost 3 hours, I decided to have something to eat. There was another problem. I couldn't find anything to eat because my food habits are very different from canadian ones. I had to eat something, and I ate a terrible croissant. I was feeling miserable. It was very difficult to leave my family, my friends and my country and just on the first day I had such problems. I was also insecure, because it is not easy to deal with problems in another language. Fortunately, I could solve all of them, but it was for sure an unpleasant and stressed situation.